Joost yesterday hired Jason Gaedtke as its new chief software architect. Joost's last top engineer, the recently departed CTO Dirk-Willem van Gulik fared poorly with his coworkers, one of whom described him as "an arrogant, condescending jerk." Gaedtke will face less peer review, if only because fewer people now work at Joost. Three marketers lost their jobs with the company yesterday as part of Joost's efforts to "streamline its operations," as NewTeeVee reports.

Jon Rubinstein, the chairman of Palm, is once again striking former boss Steve Jobs where it hurts — Apple's talent. The latest hire: Lynn Fox, the head of Mac PR, joined Palm earlier this month. For a PR person, she's made the move surprisingly quietly; her name has yet to appear on any press releases. As with Mike Bell, the Apple veteran who now heads Palm's product development, Rubinstein is likely trying to keep things quiet. Relations between Palm and Apple, whose iPhone is walloping Palm's Treo, are tense enough as it is.

Confirming early reports, Rafat Ali posted the details of ContentNext Media's new hires, including the promotion of employee number two Staci D. Kramer (pictured, right) to co-editor and EVP and plans to lease space in downtown Manhattan, expanding the company's geographic footprint to the other coast from its current space in Santa Monica. Patrick Dignan (pictured, left) from Forbes will join new CEO Nathan Richardson in New York, and Charlie Koones (pictured, center), former president and publisher of entertainment trade Variety joins the board. Seems more and more execs are buying into Ali's belief that "in the near future, all media will be digital media."

ContentNext Media, the parent company of blogtrepreneur Rafat Ali's media news site PaidContent.org has named former Dow Jones executive Nathan Richardson as the company's new CEO. He's pictured here in his days as general manager of Yahoo Finance. Most recently, Richardson has been doing volunteer work in Liberia for the International Rescue Committee. The move will free Ali from his role as CEO to focus on editorial duties. Look for the company to announce another senior-level hire by early next week. The move makes it clear that company is focused on continuing to grow independently — and Ali certainly won't be selling it to TechCrunch investor-slash-journalist Michael Arrington anytime soon. Update: More on the company's as-yet-unannounced moves after the jump.

Such is the plight of the dying magazine business: Newsweek paid what's rumored to be a high-six-figures ransom not to keep Steven Levy, its star tech writer, but to unburden itself of him just so he could join Wired. The Washington Post-owned weekly is offering editorial staff generous buyouts, up to two years' salaries, to reduce its headcount. Levy smartly leapt at the offer, knowing he could easily get a job elsewhere. Something seems backwards in this labor market: Don't acquirers normally pay a premium for control?

Quietly ousted last August after seven years at Yahoo, former ad-sales chief Gregory Coleman has been hired as CEO of ad-targeting startup NetSeer. Coleman's main job at Yahoo was to protect chief sales officer Wenda Harris Millard from meddling managers while she generated revenue. Millard left for a new gig as a president at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia last June, giving the company enough time to see exactly how valuable Coleman was. At NetSeer, he won't have to deal with meddling, indecisive bosses any more — he's earned the right to be that meddling, indecisive boss.

Microsoft VP Joanne Bradford has left the company and will join Los Angeles-based ad agency Spot Runner. Even with a new title of EVP, it's hardly a leap up the ladder. Our guess on why Bradford bolted? A former executive at Microsoft and Yahoo told us, " I shudder to think about a MSNBC.com and Yahoo News integration." Bradford's departure plans likely came together not long after Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made it clear he favored Yahoo's brands over the MSN portal Bradford ran.

Neil Budde, the founding editor of WSJ.com and former Yahoo News chief has won a new gig at the Los Angeles Times. Despite the woes of print newspapers, trading Jerry Yang as a boss for foulmouthed motorcyclist Sam Zell sounds like a good bet right now.

At Apple's shareholder meeting today, Steve Jobs said the Apple board has many potential successors to choose from should something happen to him. "We've got great talent ... we talk about it a lot." Candidates include COO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer. Have you ever seen either of those guys talk? Jobs is said to be worth $16 billion in market cap to Apple. Apple PR could spend that much on media training for Apple's stiffs-in-waiting, and they still wouldn't fill the seats at a Macworld keynote. Our vote is for design guru Jonathan Ive, who'll shut up and let the gadgets speak for themselves.

Does Mark Zuckerberg read Valleywag? Facebook's young CEO isn't known for taking unsolicited advice, but we suggested he hire Google executive Sheryl Sandberg just two weeks ago. Well, that was fast: BoomTown reports Sandberg's been hired as Facebook's COO. Sandberg is Facebook's first woman executive, and she's older than Zuckerberg's 20something brain trust. But demographics are not the reason this hire is striking.

E-Trade named its chairman, former JPMorgan Chase executive Donald Layton, as its new CEO today. Layton joined E-Trade as its chairman in November, after hedge fund Citadel invested $1.75 billion in the company. E-Trade lost big money investing in mortgage-backed securities. [WSJ]

Mark Zuckerberg wants to hire a well-known executive to help him run Facebook, BoomTown reports. It's like when Google founders Brin and Page hired a then-obscure Eric Schmidt away from Novell, except Zuckerberg wants to keep the CEO title. "It has to be someone who does not overshadow Mark," a source told BoomTown, "But also someone who can challenge him when he needs challenging."

Yahoo laid off more than a thousand people last week, including Jeff Bonforte, a vice president whose job was rendered superfluous long before he was made redundant. Now we learn that he's taken the job of CEO at Xobni, a promising email startup. Curious: Did Xobni make a snap decision to hire Bonforte? Unlikely. Instead of quitting to take the job at Xobni, he waited to extract a package from Yahoo. Yahoo's shareholders and his ex-colleagues might not share our view, but we applaud Bonforte's cynical opportunism.

VentureBeat owner Matt Marshall confirmed to me that he matched respected veteran Valley biz reporter Dean Takahashi's salary to lure Takahashi away from the San Jose Mercury News. How much is that? Unknown, Captain, but in the 1990s, Takahashi's rumored $125,000 annual pay at the original Red Herring had local journalists frothing over their beers. Wait'll they find out what the guys in IT make.

Dean Takahashi, a veteran tech reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, has quit the newspaper to join VentureBeat. [GameSpot]

CEO Greg Brown is taking personal charge of the company's troubled cell-phone business. One wonders where he got that idea. Next thing we know, Motorola's board will be basing his pay on the number of cell phones he sells. Oh, what's that — they already do?

The former manager of digital media at Wal-Mart, Kevin Swint, has joined Apple to head up its international video effort, including overseas movie rentals through iTunes. In recent weeks, Wal-Mart has closed its online video-download service and cut back its other digital initiatives. [AppleInsider]

Has Ari Balogh arrived too late? That's the key question for Yahoo's new CTO, freshly hired away from VeriSign. Balogh will take charge of all of Yahoo's engineering functions, essentially leaderless since former CTO Farzad Nazem quit last May. The new blood could bring some much-needed shakeups. Presumably, current tech executives Usama Fayyad, Qi Lu, and Ash Patel will report to him. One wonders how long that situation will last. Patel, in particular, has been checked out for some time, according to sources at Yahoo, and Balogh's hire may be his cue to leave. Balogh will have another challenge: VeriSign's reputation.

Rupert Murdoch can't hire media maven Tina Brown to the Wall Street Journal, because, well, she hates him and the feeling's probably mutual. But a clone has been found! Her name is Tina, she's a Brit, and she worked at Tatler too! Tina Gaudoin will be the editor of the Journal's new "lifestyle magazine" when it launches in the fall. Rupert, dear, perhaps we ought to devote some time to this during our next session? Murdoch's murky id aside (or not!) what's with News Corp's anti-American hiring proclivities, hmm? Besides Gaudoin (far left) Murdoch's top people include Robert Thomson, the Journal's new Australian publisher and his countryman Col Allan, prickly editor of the New York Post. A few weeks ago, Allan's replacement was rumored to be Rebekah Wade, the firey-maned editor of the Sun. The Post has since dismissed that rumor. Wade wouldn't have been the first UK lady to run the tab—Xana Antunes was editor there till she was canned in 2001. Not that we, um, have anything against editors from overseas. We're just saying.

Palm has hired Mike Bell, a 16-year Apple veteran, as its SVP of product development. But you'll never hear that from Palm. The hiring of an industry veteran for a top executive spot is something normally trumpeted as loudly as possible. But Palm is desperately trying to keep quiet the fact that it won over Bell shortly before Christmas. Why the silencing effort? Jon Rubinstein, Palm's chairman, was part of Steve Jobs's turnaround team before he left Apple in 2006. Since he joined Palm last year, the smartphone maker has been hiring a number of Apple engineers. There have been "screaming matches and threats of lawsuits," says a plugged-in source.